Just reading about the passing of Brian Stableford. Never read any of his own actual works, but I knew of him as a translator of French literature, especially for Black Coat Press, in which capacity he’s Englished a whole lot of books in the French fantastic tradition… there being a whole lot of SF, fantasy, horror and pulp in French that’s kind of gone unknown by us Anglophones for literal centuries (apart from Jules Verne, whose first English critics woefully misunderstood as a children’s author). And so it is that Stableford introduced me to two of the most singular books I’ve ever read, Petrus Borel’s Champavert and Edgar Quinet’s Ahasuerus; both published in the early/mid-1830s, the former is a sort of late gothic collection of tales possessed of a very peculiar black humour, and the latter is… just something else. I really don’t know what to call it, basically it’s a vision of the history of the world from the creation to the last judgement, with the latter event going very much not according to plan, but what form is it? A novel told entirely in dialogue without descriptions? A play which features the entire universe as a character at one point? I remember while I was reading it that I could actually imagine the text being sung, as if it were an oratorio or something (and an extremely atonal one at that). So, respect to Brian Stableford for making these two books available to me that I would otherwise never have read…
